A driverless Cruise car sits in traffic on Austin Street in downtown Houston on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Photo: Jay R. Jordan/Axios
General Motors said Tuesday it will retreat from the robotaxi business and stop funding its money-losing Cruise autonomous vehicle unit.
Instead, the Detroit automaker will focus on development of partially automated driver-assist systems for personal vehicles like its Super Cruise, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel.
GM said it would get out of robotaxis “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
The company said it will combine Cruise’s technical team with its own to work on advanced systems to assist drivers.
[…]
GM’s brushoff of Cruise represents a dramatic about-face from years of full-blown support that left a huge financial dent in the automaker. The company invested $2.4 billion in Cruise only to sustain years of uninterrupted losses, with little in return. Since GM bought a controlling stake in Cruise for $581 million in 2016, the robotaxi service piled up more than $10 billion in operating losses while bringing in less than $500 million in revenue, according to GM shareholder reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The automaker even announced plans for Cruise to generate $1 billion in annual revenue by 2025, but it scaled back spending on the company after one of its autonomous Chevrolet Bolts dragged a San Francisco pedestrian who was hit by another vehicle in 2023.
The California Public Utilities Commission alleged Cruise then covered up details of the crash for more than two weeks.
The embarrassing incident resulted in Cruise’s license to operate its driverless fleet in California being suspended by regulators and triggered a purge of its leadership — in addition to layoffs that jettisoned about a quarter of its workforce.
GM CEO Mary Barra told analysts on a conference call Tuesday the the new unit will focus on personal vehicles and developing systems that can drive by themselves in certain circumstances.
The company has agreements to buy another 7% of Cruise and intends to buy the remaining shares so it owns the whole company.
GM’s statement is here. It was just six months ago that Cruise made its return to Houston, though as far as I can tell they never got past the testing stage. (More recently, Cruise announced a pilot program for wheelchair-accessible vehicles; I have no idea what may happen with that.) Now if you want to ride in a robotaxi in Texas for some reason, you’ll need to go to Austin and sign up for a Waymo account. Let us know if you do. Business Insider, Car and Driver, TechCrunch, The Verge, and Jalopnik have more.